The Exercise One Physical Therapist Uses to Curb Boredom, ‘er Insanity - by Brent Dodge

What do you get when you add one burpee everyday for 100 days? First of all, what the heck is a burpee?

To begin, stand tall and then jump horizontally onto the ground onto your hands, using your arms to slow your fall. After your chest meets the ground, quickly push up with your arms, pulling your legs fully under you. Then jump up and clap your hands as your feet leave the ground.

(To see a quick video of a person doing a burpee, click here.)

That’s one. Ready to do another one?

Now that you’ve done one today, you merely need to add one (for a total of two) tomorrow, three the next day, and so on . . .  up to 100.

This is known in some circles as the “100 day burpee challenge.”

When you’ve added one burpee a day for 100 days, you will end up doing 5,050 burpees. Interestingly, the half way point in terms of volume occurs on day 72. That means that for the last 28 days you end up doing as many burpees as you did from day one to day 72. Wild.

I did my first burpee challenge back in 2009. Notably, when I got up to about 85, I went to China for a couple weeks. While in Kunming, China, the burpees were super hard to do because Kunming is at about 8,000 feet above sea level. You can hardly catch your breath enough to string about 20 burpees together.

However, you’ll never guess where I was on day 100. Hong Kong! Doing 100 burpees at sea level is almost enjoyable. Well, not really. But it was way easier to string a lot of burpees together while doing them at sea level.

Earlier this year, four people started a 100 day burpee challenge. Two of us will complete our 100th day this coming Saturday. We only made one change in the burpee challenge this year, and it was my bright idea. Our goal was to do each day’s amount of burpees unbroken, meaning without stopping. Yeouch! Now that we’re in the high 90s per day, we’re sort of wishing we hadn’t set that as a goal.

Why would anyone want to do a 100 day burpee challenge? Boredom? Insanity? I still haven’t figured that out. I did find that my conditioning levels are at a new and higher level. My physique has changed markedly too. Along with greater definition in my arms and legs, my abs and torso are much more defined than they were nearly 100 days ago. And if anyone asks me to jump down and get up quickly 100 times, well, I can pretty much do that too!

Heck, you don’t have to do the burpee challenge, but you may want to throw some burpees into your workout to kick up the heat now and again.
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I’ll post again once I determine that I didn’t die while attempting to do 100 unbroken burpees this coming Saturday, the final day of this burpee challenge!